The Man Who Saved the Union (33 page)

As the battle neared, Grant grew eager. “
The rebels are now massing on Corinth in the northwest angle of the railroad,” he wrote Halleck. For weeks they had eluded him; now that they were willing to do battle he hoped to crush them. He urged his generals forward. “
We should attack if they do not; do it soon,” he wrote Rosecrans. “Fight!” To
Stephen Hurlbut he declared, “
The combined force of the enemy does not exceed thirty thousand. He must be whipped.”

Yet coordination remained critical. Hurlbut was coming to reinforce Rosecrans at Corinth; unless they worked in tandem, and swiftly, the Confederates would pick them off separately. “
Make all dispatch,” Grant ordered Hurlbut. To Rosecrans he said, “
If the enemy fall back push them with all force possible and save Hurlbut, who is now on the way to your relief.” The two forces must act in close concert. “Hurlbut is not strong enough to handle the rebels without very good luck,” Grant told Rosecrans. “Don’t neglect this warning.”

The Confederates almost preempted Grant’s joining of forces. Van Dorn struck at dawn on October 4, hoping to overwhelm Rosecrans before Hurlbut arrived. The attack was spirited and sanguinary, with the Confederates inflicting and receiving many casualties. But the Federals held their own, and by the time Hurlbut’s column and that of
James McPherson, whom Grant had summoned from Jackson, reached the scene, the Confederates were falling back.

Hurlbut contested the Confederate retreat but Rosecrans did not. Deciding his men had fought enough for one day, he let them rest overnight. “
We move at daylight in the morning,” he assured Grant.

Grant put the best face on things for the administration in Washington. “
The enemy are in full retreat leaving their dead and wounded on the field,” he informed Halleck. “
Everything looks most favorable.”

But he fumed at another opportunity’s being lost. “
Push the enemy to the wall,” he demanded of Rosecrans. The next day he ordered: “
You will avail yourself of every advantage and capture and destroy the rebel army to the utmost of your power.”

Rosecrans belatedly gave halfhearted and ineffectual chase. Grant, disgusted, ordered him back to Corinth—only to have Rosecrans protest
the return order and call for reinforcements. Grant denied the request. “
Although partial success might result from further pursuit,” Grant explained to Halleck, “disaster would follow in the end.”

A
braham Lincoln heard the news from Mississippi and sighed relief. “
I congratulate you and all concerned on your recent victories,” the president wrote Grant. “How does it all sum up?”

Grant had wished he could report the capture of an entire army. But on reflection he judged the results still substantial. “
About eight hundred rebels already buried,” he replied to the president. “Their loss in killed about nine to one of ours. The ground is not yet cleared of their unburied dead. Prisoners yet arriving by every wagon road and train.… Our killed and wounded at Corinth will not exceed nine hundred, many of them slightly.”

The more Lincoln thought about it, the more he appreciated what had been accomplished. “
The victory was most triumphant as it was,” he asserted in his official report on Corinth. “All praise is due officers and men for their undaunted courage and obstinate resistance against an enemy outnumbering them as three to two.” Grant’s part of the western theater was secure and the Confederates in the region were badly weakened. Price and Van Dorn were prevented from joining Bragg, whose invasion of Kentucky collapsed.

In late October the War Department acknowledged Grant’s achievement by giving him command of the Department of the Tennessee, encompassing western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, southern Illinois and western Kentucky. Halleck offered no guidance regarding operations, so Grant, the day after he took command, made a suggestion of his own: “
With small reinforcements at Memphis I think I would be able to move down the Mississippi Central road and cause the evacuation of Vicksburg.”

29

T
HE LARGER HIS RESPONSIBILITY GREW, THE MORE WORRIED
G
RANT
became about the vulnerabilities of his position. He shared
Sherman’s concern that the
cotton trade was arming the rebels and Sherman’s conviction that the trade must be halted if the occupation of the South was to be successful. Like Sherman he expressed his views to Salmon Chase, although in terms less confrontational than those Sherman employed. He told the Treasury secretary that he understood the administration’s reasons for treating occupied territory like other parts of the Union with respect to commerce. “
It is, however, a very grave question in my mind, whether this policy of ‘letting trade follow the flag’ is not working injuriously to the Union cause,” he continued. “Practically and really I think it is benefiting almost exclusively, first, a class of greedy traders whose first and only desire is gain, and to whom it would be idle to attribute the least patriotism, and secondly our enemies south of our lines.” Grant said he had tried to counter the problem, to no avail. “Our lines are so extended that it is impossible for any military surveillance to contend successfully with the cunning of the traders, aided by the local knowledge and eager interest of the residents along the border. The enemy are thus receiving supplies of most necessary and useful articles which relieves their sufferings and strengthens them for resistance to our authority; while we are sure that the benefits thus conferred tend in no degree to abate their rancorous hostility to our flag and Government.” The current situation must not continue. “The evil is a great and growing one, and needs immediate attention.”

Charles Dana agreed. Dana had been a journalist and would become
a spy for Edwin Stanton and the War Department within Grant’s camp; meanwhile he thought to try his hand at cotton trading. But he had no sooner arrived in Memphis than he discovered the destructive effect the cotton trade was having on the Union war effort. “
The mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton, raging in a vast population of
Jews and Yankees scattered throughout this whole country, and in this town almost exceeding the numbers of the regular residents, has to an alarming extent corrupted and demoralized the army,” Dana wrote to Stanton. “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay. I had no conception of the extent of this evil until I came and saw it for myself. Besides, the resources of the rebels are inordinately increased from this source. Plenty of cotton is brought in from beyond our lines, especially by the agency of Jewish traders, who pay for it ostensibly in Treasury notes, but really in gold.” Dana recommended a draconian curtailment of the cotton trade, starting with the expulsion of all private traders.

David Porter, the commander of Union naval forces in Grant’s theater, was equally indignant at the cotton speculation. Porter contended that the Treasury’s program of sending aides, or agents, to license the commerce was worse than no program at all. “
A greater pack of knaves never went unhung,” Porter wrote. “Human nature is very weak, and the poor aides, with their small pay, could easily be bribed to allow a man to land 100 barrels of salt when he had only permit for two. And so on with everything else. The thing is done now so openly that the guerrillas come down to the bank and purchase what they want.”

Bolstered by the support of others who had seen the problem firsthand, Grant decided to try something new. “
Gold and silver will not be paid within this district by speculators for the products of the rebel states,” he ordered. “United States Treasury notes are a legal tender in all cases, and when refused, the parties refusing them will be arrested.… Any speculator paying out gold and silver in violation of this order will be arrested and sent North.” He proposed, without yet giving an order, extending his Memphis ban on rebel sympathizers within Union lines to the western district as a whole. “
There is an evident disposition on the part of many of the citizens to join the guerrillas on their approach,” he explained to Halleck. “I am decidedly in favor of turning all discontented citizens within our lines out South.”

Halleck told Grant to go ahead with the removal. “
It is very desirable
that you should clean out West Tennessee and North Mississippi of all organized enemies,” Halleck said. “If necessary, take up all active sympathizers and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use.… It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of war on our side.”

But the administration vetoed Grant’s attempt to curtail the cotton trade. Halleck passed along orders from Stanton: “The payment of gold should not be prohibited.… See that all possible facilities are afforded for getting out cotton. It is deemed important to get as much as we can into market.”

Grant later described the administration’s reversal of his cotton policy as an “
embarrassment.” He understood the political and diplomatic reasons for the reversal but believed military considerations should have been given priority. “Stations on the Mississippi River and on the railroad in our possession had to be designated where cotton would be received,” he wrote in his memoirs. “This opened to the enemy not only the means of converting cotton into money which had a value all over the world and which they so much needed, but it afforded them means of obtaining accurate and intelligent information in regard to our position and strength. It was also demoralizing to our troops. Citizens obtaining permits from the Treasury department had to be protected within our lines and given facilities to get out cotton by which they realized enormous profits.” Speaking for himself as much as for his troops, Grant declared, “Men who had enlisted to fight the battles of their country did not like to be engaged in protecting a traffic which went to the support of an enemy they had to fight, and the profits of which went to men who shared none of their dangers.”

S
o he tried to work around the administration’s order. He required cotton brokers and purchasers of other commodities to receive permits from their local provost marshals in addition to the licenses they were issued by Washington. Moreover, they must stay in the rear of the army. “
It will be regarded as evidence of disloyalty for persons to go beyond the lines of the Army to purchase cotton or other products, and all contracts made for such articles, in advance of the Army, or for cotton in the field, are null and void.… All parties so offending will be expelled from the Department.”

The measure had little effect. Grant’s inspectors couldn’t be everywhere, nor could every one of them resist the bribes the traders offered. The commerce continued much as before.

He tried to focus on the
Vicksburg campaign. “
My plans are all complete for weeks to come,” he wrote his sister on December 15. “I hope to have them all work out just as planned.” But success wouldn’t come easily, and the effort was exacting a personal toll. “For a conscientious person, and I profess to be one, this is a most slavish life. I may be envied by ambitious persons, but I in turn envy the person who can transact his daily business and retire to a quiet home without a feeling of responsibility for the morrow. Taking my whole department, there are an immense number of lives staked upon my judgment and acts.” He was surrounded—literally—by enemies. “I am extended now like a peninsula into an enemies’ country with a large army depending for their daily bread upon keeping open a line of railroad running one hundred and ninety miles through an enemy’s country, or at least through territory occupied by a people terribly embittered and hostile to us.… With all my other trials I have to contend against is added that of speculators whose patriotism is measured by dollars and cents. Country has no value with them compared with money.”

Like Sherman,
Dana and others who dealt with the speculators, Grant perceived
Jews as playing a large part in the cotton trade. He had accompanied his order embargoing gold and silver with a note to
Isaac Quinby, the commander of the district of the Mississippi: “
Examine the baggage of all speculators coming south, and when they have specie, turn them back. If medicine and other contraband articles, arrest them and confiscate the contraband articles. Jews should receive special attention.” He sent a similar order to
Stephen Hurlbut: “
Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out.” To
Joseph Webster, of his staff, he wrote: “
Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”

As he got further into the planning for Vicksburg, Grant formulated yet another policy against the speculators. “
I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into Post Commanders that the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders,” he
explained to the War Department. “So well satisfied of this have I been that I instructed the commanding officer at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come south, and frequently have had them expelled from the Department. But they come in with their carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood yard or landing on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves they will act as agents for someone else who will be at a military post with a Treasury permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes, which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold. There is but one way that I know of to reach this case. That is for Government to buy all the cotton at a fixed rate and send it to Cairo, St. Louis or some other point to be sold. Then all traders—they are a curse to the Army—might be expelled.”